West with the Night

Her writing is at times charming and others extremely dry and sort of pompous. The story is one of her life growing up in Africa and eventually taking on livelihoods like horse training and flight-related jobs, which is interesting, but she is kind of personally unremarkable, and also, clearly has an English colonist mindset, which is, you know, sorta icky, to say the least.

A passage I liked: “Menegai Crater overlooks the township and the lake. In the time of man it has breathed no brimstone, and barely a wisp of smoke. But in the annals of the Rift Valley which contains all this as a sea contains a coral atoll or a desert a dune, the time of man is too brief a period to deserve more than incidental recording. Tomorrow, next day, or next year, Menegai may become again the brazier over which some passing deity will, for a casual aeon or so, warm his omnipotent hands. But until then, one can stand safely on its edge, watching the lake of pink and scarlet wings, so far below– the lake that seems to have stolen, for the moment, at least, all the mountain's fire.”

A passage that shows how mundane her mindset is, to have grown up in Africa, around African people, and still somehow find herself superior: “I couldn't help wondering what Africa would have been like if such physique as these Kavirondo had were coupled with equal intelligence – or perhaps I should say with cunning equal to that of their white brethren.” This leads into her speculating on how “progress” hasn't hit Africa yet, but someday it will be filled with “pleasure resorts” and competitive railways advertising themselves as the names of the tribes whose land they would have colonized, and how this is a desirable thing that will take the place from “wasteland” to “paradise”. Ew.